The Berkshires to Istria, and back (2/2)

Rovinj, Croatia. Dawn, July 27.

I knew I was in for an interesting journey home from the start. I had bought the round-trip ferry ticket because it was cheaper, which meant I had to get to the dock very early — a lot of day-trippers get these tickets, so you have to present for boarding at 6 a.m. That makes for a sad night's sleep, but it's always rewarding to remind yourself what dawn looks like. That morning had a spectacular Mediterranean sunrise, with blues and pinks and golds like some Tiepolo absurdity.

I took a cab to the pier, and once there got into an argument with the driver. There was a dispute over the charge — 90 kunas (that's around $15) for a three minute ride, instead of the 60 kunas the meter read. This is apparently the official "shakedown tourists leaving town" rate, because it had been quoted to us the previous day when we called a different cab company. We had hung up on them.

There were a lot of people already milling about the good ship SS San Gwann, when a group of Venezia Lines officials appeared and set up a makeshift ticket counter. Then proceeded to inform us each that the boat was broken and couldn't sail, so we could take a refund or go on a chartered bus. The daytrippers left, but I figured I would get through it alright. But it wasn't easy. What would have been a three-hour trip turned into a six-hour one, thanks to traffic between Trieste and Venice. Even worse the air conditioner unit above me began leaking — not dripping really, leaking — on my head for the last hour of the trip. I made a makeshift tent out of the curtain and did my best to hide.

In Venice, I found my hotel very quickly — again without a map — and had a few days in the Serene Republic. I'll write more about that later. I continued on on Monday. There is a strange feeling the morning of a heavy day of travel, when you shower and put on your socks and realize the next time you are going to go through these motions it will be at your own home, on the other side of the planet, in about two days.

I had a few hours to kill before having to head to the airport, so I left my bags and hiked around the city. I stopped for lunch of cicchetti at a little place on Campo San Margherita, but I was so distracted by flipping through La Gazzetta dello Sport that I dropped a huge dollop of olive oil on my right knee. I thought despondently about how long I was going to have to look at that stain in the coming hours.

Marco Polo Airport is a remarkably undistinguished airport, not what you might expect from a place like Venice. Its best feature is the little food court on the north end of the departures area, which has a striking view over the lagoon toward the city, which looks remarkably large and close from there. I spent awhile there having a Peroni, watching a Carnival cruise ship maneuver away through the lagoon toward the sea like some kind of moving apartment block. Very strange.

I had to spend the night in Istanbul, which was a surprisingly easy. I wandered around a bit, hit the duty-free for some lokum, drank an Efes and watched things swirling around. I was in Istanbul for a few days a year ago, and I would have loved to get into the city for awhile. But it was the middle of the night, so I had to settle for the strange tableau of the globalized world you see at an international airport. In the dead of night in Istanbul there are a lot of flights to the former Soviet Union, to central Asia and the Gulf states. Lots of women in hijabs, tough-looking CIS dudes in track suits or polyester casualwear, guys that look they are going from one place to another and will never make it back. The thing about the people you observe in an airport is that you really can't match what they are going through the way you can in a place with the usual amount of gravity. You feel like you are in the background of what might be someone's very interesting movie.

Happily for my effort to not completely destroy my sleep schedule for a month, the airport is pretty spacious, and I didn't have trouble finding a pair of seats on which to stretch out. I'd brought along an eyeshade to block out the pervasive dull light, and was tired enough that I could tune out the occasional Turkish announcements over the PA system. Had to leave bright and early in the morning. Flying to America seems to now involve another layer of security theater, so we had to get our passports checked again at the gate, which was time-consuming and pointless. Then the long flight back.

Once again, the menace of getting the times to line up failed me. I had a few hours to get from JFK to Port Authority Bus Terminal, and a big suitcase, so I decided to hang out in the arrivals hall because at least there was coffee and a place to sit. Good choice. Port Authority seems to have been somewhat cleaned up since the last time I really saw it — they seem to have gotten the homeless problem under control. But it is still a profoundly dispiriting place, with its dark tiles, an absence of sunlight, and a general sense of dropping a few scales down the socioeconomic ladder. I would like to get into the minds of those designers who made this place, and see what it was like the first day it opened. Did it seem like a bracing peek into a bold and efficient future, or was it always a grim warning of an impending dystopia of ugly buildings and social freefall? And did they deliberately create this disorientating sensation around the place, is it some kind of brutalist prank? How come it looks so enormous when you see it from the outside, yet the inside feels like a rat tunnel? Is it supposed to be a vision of some alternate reality, a place that should have never happened? A cautionary, counterfactual lesson about where America's postwar obsessions with automotives and fossil fuels would lead?

And what is most striking is how inefficiently it handles the basic task of providing information to ensure travelers get to the right place. How can a place that purportedly handles nearly a quarter million people a day not have any timetables or information boards anywhere? To find my gate I had to wait in line at the ticket window to ask, because nothing else at all seemed trustworthy.

Anyway, my hatred of long-distance bus travel is deep. It reminds me of those desperate, poor days in college when I would have to stand for hours to get home for Thanksgiving (pleased to see that no less a lover of travel and the open road than Jack Kerouac was on my side about bus travel).

And the fact that there is just no need for it. There are functioning railroad tracks running all the way from Manhattan to the old Williamstown train station three blocks from my house. That this is how generations of people travelled from here to there. Instead, I was stuck on a belching, rattling emissions-spewing contraption, winding around the old state roads of far western Connecticut and Massachusetts. There were three of us left on the bus by the time we reached town.

I wasn't done yet though! I still had to walk from the Williams Inn across the center of town to my house, dragging the suitcase bravely along behind me. I was at the end of my street, across from my driveway, when the right wheel finally gave up and popped out. And that was that.

So I've spent two blog posts complaining about the details of modern travel. But I haven't offered a word about what I did in between. I haven't written about watching my daughter learn to snorkel in the Adriatic, the pleasantness of having a glass of Favorit beer watching the sun set into the sea, the taste of a big plate of spaghetti al nero di seppia, standing beneath Titian's Assumption at the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, sitting on the ledge of a canal at an enoteca in Cannaregio, with a glass of wine, watching people walk by.

I try always to remind myself of some of my summers in high school. I worked mornings and evenings, and would sometimes spend afternoons sitting in the backyard. Usually I'd read, sometimes I'd read travel books about Italy and France that I'd taken from the public library. I'd sometimes see a speck of silver from an airliner impossibly high up, and wonder if I'd ever be on one.

So, yes, I'd happily do it over again.